Sometimes, it takes a fire to knock down a century-old church in Bushwick. Sometimes, it takes just four million dollars. 

“I think that’s close,” Nell Archer told me when I mentioned the four million dollar sum circulated by members of the Mayday Space last week.

Mayday, a post-Occupy organizing space that offers free meditation classes and ICE response networks, has been renting out the space from a local episcopal church, the Iglesia de la Santa Cruz (172-180 St. Nicholas Ave.) since at least 2015. It functions as a connective tissue between the folksy-left DIY era of Bushwick and the harder-edged DSA present, a sort of museum celebrating the collective memory of the area right as it was about to be resculpted by the latest wave of condominiums and newbuilds. Sandy Nurse, one of its original founders, now represents the area in City Council.

But next year, the group won’t be doing that there anymore. The church is being turned into a newbuild, too.  

The Episcopal Diocese of Long Island, which operates episcopal churches from Brooklyn to Suffolk County, has decided to knock down the church, which has sat on St. Nicholas Avenue since the early 1920s, its thick steeple overlooking a quietly changing group of parishioners. 

The church had been originally called the Church of the Holy Cross, when its congregants consisted largely of “older German-American immigrants to this area who have subsequently departed for parts north and east,” Archer told me. In the mid-2000s, the diocese re-opened the church as the Iglesia de la Santa Cruz, with explicitly Spanish-language services.  

“And, you know, the neighborhood has changed a lot,” said Archer. “The diocese wanted to be responsive to the people who were in the neighborhood.”

If the deal goes through, construction will begin next year. Like the members of the Mayday space, Archer told me that the congregation is also on the hunt to find a place to house its congregants once the building gets knocked down. 

Under terms of the deal, the congregation would keep a portion of the space to continue to use as a church. 

“I mean, what we’ll end up with will be a kind of raw space that we’ll have to build back. You know, we’ll have to furnish and whatnot, and put in walls and stuff. So I think that’s yet to be determined,” said Archer.

The actual deal itself has yet to be signed and Archer told me she hadn’t been told the name of the developer. She didn’t know very much about it and neither did Vincent Anderson, one of the co-founders of another group that uses the church, called the Bushwick Abbey, subject of a recent criterion channel dot com documentary called The Reverend. Per the New York Times, Anderson is also employed to play the piano during the church’s Spanish-language services. 

Anderson’s group had started conducting services inside Radio Bushwick, a Wyckoff Avenue bar that has since become Dock Asian Eatery (22 Wycoff Ave.)

“They used to meet in a bar, which was kind of a popular hipster thing to do, on Sunday mornings, because nobody was in the bars on Sunday mornings,” Archer recalls. When Radio Bushwick lost its lease, they reached an agreement to work out of the Iglesia de la Santa Cruz, where the group does English-language services. 

Per Archer’s count, the Spanish-language Iglesia congregation totals between 50 to 75, and the Bushwick Abbey crowd adds another 30. Eventually, they’ll return to the space once it becomes something else.  

“I mean, we’ll have a separate entrance than the people who are living in apartments, if that’s what it’s going to be,” says Archer. She takes exception to some of the rumors coming from members of the Mayday Space; a week ago, a career prison abolitionist, P, told me that “word on the street is that it’s going to be a luxury residential property.”

“I mean, maybe it will, maybe it won’t,” returned Archer. “There’s no information to back that up. So, you know, I mean, I’m sure they want to make as much money as they can, but the idea that it’s going to be some luxury tower is just not based in reality.” 

It would be something and people would live there. Luxury or not, medium base rents for a single apartment in the area currently sit at $3,495.

For some time, Archer told me, the church had endeavored to reach a deal with the nearby Wyckoff Heights Medical Center (374 Stockholm St.) to rent out the place as outpatient space. That might’ve been more of a social good than more market-rate apartments, but that deal fell through.

“I think they just couldn’t come up with the capital that was necessary,’ said Archer. Unlike the hospital, the developers don’t seem to have that problem.

Money is largely the reason why the church is selling too. Unlike Catholic congregations, Archer told me, episcopal churches are financially independent from the larger diocese. 

A certain kind of malleability is required, whether that’s changing languages, renting out space to activists or selling out to condo developers. It’s all history, a line going forward. Nostalgia is pointless. 

“If you’re a church where all your parishioners are relatively poor, then you don’t have a big budget. You know, you’re struggling to pay the bills. And that has always been the case here,” said Archer. “In fact, we’re a very poor church.” 

It would be nice to live in 2015 forever, perhaps, to live perpetually in a Bushwick that was just on the precipice of becoming something else, but those fantasies require money too.

“If we had some big, fat donor who [gave] us the resources to restore this to its early 20th century glory, I would be delighted to do that. You know, it’s just a little clapboard church with a little steeple. But we don’t,” said Archer.  

Anderson, the founding member of Bushwick Abbey, told me the congregation “is predominantly trans [and] queer,” so they’re dealing with a lot. “It’s really two congregations that, you know, are being threatened right now,” he told me. 

Anderson said the group will also have to look for a new space, which will likely be smaller than what the congregation has been working with for over a decade. 

“We’re going to start looking at, maybe, small storefronts. Maybe we can work with another church, you know,” he said. “Right now, that’s going to be considerably smaller than the space we have now. But we are looking for something.”

Nevertheless, he’s not complaining. It is what it is. They’re leaving the larger, century-old church after two decades. It was falling apart, anyway.

“It’s really the boiler. We’ve been fixing it for 10, 15, 20 years now. At this point, like, that boiler is held together by duct tape and, you know, super glue,” said Anderson. 

He had worked with Mayday in the past, but didn’t appreciate the sense coming from them that the church was doing anything wrong in deciding to kick them out once the group’s lease ends at the end of year. 

“It’s been really hard communicating with the church. They have not been forthcoming with timelines,” a member of the Mayday space told members during a town hall the other week.

“Yeah, I would call BS on that,” he told me. He said he used to participate in the group’s weekly meetings, and “it always felt like the communication was there.”

Anderson also didn’t appreciate members of the Mayday Space suddenly calling church members like himself “landlords,” just because the church was selling the place and kicking them out. 

“We’re trying to be really transparent with Mayday, because in our view, we’ve been partners with them, not so much landlords. In fact, they’ve insisted that they call us building partners.” He sounded hurt. 

I asked Anderson if he felt any ambivalence about this move from his higher-ups in the congregation, where he’s been ordained since 2003.

“I mean, you know, I’ve spent 15 years here, and it’s served us well. And ideally, no, I would rather not have it torn down,” he said. “But I think right now, this is really the only way, this is really the only way forward.”

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Top photo of the Church of the Holy Cross, undated, courtesy of Nell Archer.